Trump and Putin, behind the scenes

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Trump reportedly moved to oust acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Joseph Maguire after a senior DNI official briefed the House Intelligence Committee about Russian efforts to aid his reelection. The president is said to have viewed the briefing as an act of disloyalty, in part because it involved sharing information with a House panel led by one of his political foes, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). He also reportedly said the briefing should not have occurred, while denying the analysis by intelligence officials and claiming the intelligence community is being “played.”

“We count on the intelligence community to inform Congress of any threat of foreign interference in our elections,” Schiff tweeted after news of Maguire’s departure. “If reports are true and the President is interfering with that, he is again jeopardizing our efforts to stop foreign meddling. Exactly as we warned he would do.” Rather than wait until Maguire’s acting role expired next month, Trump on Thursday tapped a longtime loyalist, U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, to serve as his new interim DNI chief before he nominates a permanent replacement. That move prompted renewed warnings from Democrats that Trump is willing to accept the help of foreign nations to benefit his reelection campaign — a claim that was central to their impeachment effort.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday condemned Trump’s DNI pick, comparing his lack of experience to her being asked to perform brain surgery. “It would be like sending me in for brain surgery, to do brain surgery on somebody. What?! Just doesn’t know the territory. And it’s very important territory. So what the president did is dangerous," Pelosi said during a press conference in Houston. The Washington Post first reported Trump’s motivations for removing Maguire, who was previously seen as the likely choice to lead the intelligence community. The New York Times later reported that the fallout was tied to the House briefing led by DNI official Shelby Pierson.

Trump's Intel moves spark Democratic fury | TheHill

• Ousting the acting director because he was doing his job, which includes briefing Congress
  
• Arguing the briefing should not have occurred and that Macguire was "disloyal", but these briefings are standard procedure and Congress is part of the state
  
• Arguing, without any substantiation, that the briefing was false and the security services got played
  
• Appointing a completely inexperienced replacement
  

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“Asserting that Russia is not helping Trump in 2020 ignores everything that has happened over the past four years,” the Moscow Project asserts. “Russia helped Trump; Trump helped Russia. Now, they are doing it again.” Trump recently fired his acting intelligence director, Joseph Maguire, replacing him with a loyalist: Richard Grenell, who has been serving as U.S. ambassador to Germany. Reportedly, Trump was angry with Maguire for warning that Russia would interfere in the 2020 election in the hope of helping Trump win a second term. And the Moscow Project laments, “Trump’s efforts to intimidate the intelligence community and U.S. law enforcement for his own personal benefit is working.”

The Mueller report shows, in great detail, the lengths that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his supporters went to in 2016 to help Trump defeat Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. And Trump’s presidency, according to the Moscow Project, has been a “boon” for the Kremlin. “Since taking office,” the Moscow Project observes, “President Trump has instituted policies both at home and abroad that feed into Putin’s agenda, including by degrading the transatlantic alliance, downgrading human rights and destabilizing America from within.”

Damning outline of Russian interference blows up claim the Kremlin is merely sowing chaos: The objective is to ‘reelect Trump’ – Alternet.org

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President Donald Trump reacted to Jeff Sessions’s so-so primary showing in his quest to regain his old Alabama US Senate seat by taking yet another shot at his former attorney general. But in the process of doing so, Trump confirmed one of the Mueller report’s key findings about his efforts to obstruct justice. On Wednesday morning, Trump quote-tweeted a post from Politico about Sessions’s second-place finish in Tuesday’s Republican primary — one that will result in a runoff next month between Sessions and first-place finisher Tommy Tuberville — and wrote, “This is what happens to someone who loyally gets appointed Attorney General of the United States & then doesn’t have the wisdom or courage to stare down & end the phony Russia Witch Hunt. Recuses himself on FIRST DAY in office, and the Mueller Scam begins!”

Trump’s tweet is factually incorrect. Sessions actually served as attorney general for about three weeks before he recused himself from the Russia probe on March 2, 2017, on the heels of revelations that he had misled senators during his confirmation hearing about the extent of his communications with Russians in 2016. But more significant than that fib is the broader point Trump communicated: that Sessions should have quickly shut down the investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia instead of recusing himself. Here’s the thing: The president isn’t supposed to direct the attorney general to end specific investigations, especially ones directly involving his campaign. In fact, the perception that Trump had interfered in the Russia investigation (by firing then-FBI Director James Comey two months after Sessions’s recusal) led to special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment in the first place.

As part of his investigation, Mueller investigated 10 instances where Trump potentially committed obstruction of justice. A number of them involved Trump’s repeated efforts to cajole Sessions into either limiting the investigation or unrecusing himself and ending it. As Marshall Cohen of CNN noted, the evidence Mueller laid out indicated that Trump’s conduct met all the criteria for an obstruction of justice charge. But Mueller ultimately determined that because of the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel’s 2000 opinion that the department can’t indict a sitting president, charging Trump with crimes while he’s still in office wasn’t an option for him.

Wednesday’s tweet is not the first time Trump has basically publicly admitted that he asked Sessions to end the Russia investigation. He posted a tweet that was even more direct about that demand in August 2018, one day after the trial of his former campaign manager Paul Manafort began on a host of charges related to financial crimes and money laundering that stemmed from the Mueller investigation. This was also back when Sessions was still serving as AG (Sessions resigned under pressure three months later and was replaced by William Barr).

Trump blasts Sessions on Twitter, inadvertently confirming key Mueller finding - Vox

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The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday reaffirmed its support for the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election with the goal of putting Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Tuesday's bipartisan report, from a panel chaired by North Carolina Republican Richard Burr, undercuts Trump's years of efforts to portray allegations of Kremlin assistance to his campaign as a "hoax," driven by Democrats and a “deep state” embedded within the government bureaucracy.

The intelligence community’s initial January 2017 assessment of Moscow’s influence campaign included “specific intelligence reporting to support the assessment that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the Russian government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump,” the committee’s report says. The panel also found “specific intelligence” to support the conclusion that Putin “approved and directed aspects” of the Kremlin’s interference efforts..

Notably, according to the Senate’s report, the initial assessment did not include information from or citations based on former British spy Christopher Steele’s unverified dossier of claims about Trump’s relationship with Russia. It noted that the FBI’s senior leadership insisted, though, that the dossier be mentioned in an annex. The Steele dossier is expected to be addressed in the committee’s fifth and final report.

Senate Intel report confirms Russia aimed to help Trump in 2016 - POLITICO

• Senate (where Republicans hold a majority) is unanimous.
  
• No, the 2017 Intelligence Report wasn't based on the Steele dossier, that's another Trump talking point gone.
  

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On Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the fourth volume of their bipartisan investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. This one focused on the intelligence community assessment, dropping a bombshell on every one of those accusations. Here are some of the key findings:

* The Committee found the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
* In all the interviews of those who drafted and prepared the ICA, the Committee heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.
* The Committee found that the ICA provides a proper representation of the intelligence collected by CIA, NSA, and FBI on Russian interference in 2016, and this body of evidence supports the substance and judgments of the ICA.
* The Committee found that the information provided by Christopher Steele to FBI was not used in the body of the ICA or to support any of its analytic judgments. However, a summary of this material was included in Annex A as a compromise to FBI’s insistence that the information was responsive to the presidential tasking.

It is hard to imagine a more thorough debunking of the insinuations we’ve heard from Barr and Trump’s media enablers. The Republican Senators who signed on to this report include Richard Burr, James Risch, Marco Rubio, Susan Collins, Roy Blunt, Tom Cotton, John Cornyn, and Ben Sasse, making claims that it was a partisan smear job completely untenable.

A Senate committee dropped a bombshell on Bill Barr and the right wing’s favorite Russia probe conspiracy theories – Alternet.org

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“Was Flynn improperly tricked in his January 24, 2017, interview with the FBI into misstating what he had told Kislyak?,” Ignatius writes. “If so, why did he resign and later plead guilty?” According to Ignatius, “The issue Flynn was discussing with Kislyak was so serious. Russia had secretly subverted our democratic elections. Obama, who had delayed sanctions far too long, finally took action with the December 29 expulsions. He did so on behalf of the nation, whose election system had been attacked.”

On February 13, 2017, Flynn resigned from his position as national security adviser in Trump’s new administration. “In Flynn’s February 13, 2017, resignation letter,” Ignatius explains, “he admitted that he had made misleading statements to Vice President Pence about the Kislyak call. Here’s how he put it: ‘Because of the fast pace of events, I inadvertently briefed the vice president-elect and others with incomplete information regarding phone calls with the Russian ambassador.’ That’s not the FBI talking, it’s Flynn. And the question, again, is why he misstated the facts.” Even Special Counsel Robert Mueller never got a full answer to this question. Ignatius wraps up his column by stressing that when an outgoing president was sanctioning the Russian government for interfering in a presidential election, the last thing Flynn should have been doing is saying something reassuring to a Russian ambassador. “Why was the incoming national security adviser telling the Kremlin’s man in Washington not to worry about the expulsion of 35 of his spies, because when the new administration took office, ‘we’ll review everything?’” Ignatius writes. “That was the wrong message to be sending in December 2016. And with the accumulation of evidence since then about the scope of Russian subversion, it’s even more troubling.”

Columnist zeros in on the core mystery of Michael Flynn’s case that Mueller never solved – Alternet.org

• David Ignatius in the WP: why did Flynn lie, both to the FBI as to VP Mike Pence?
  
• It's very suspect if you consider what he was lying about, reassuring the Russians they had nothing to worry about from the incoming government.
  
• Trump portrays him as a victim of "dirty cops", but he himself fired Flynn at the time (see below).
  
• The incoming Trump government was warned about Flynn by the outgoing government, but dithered for weeks.
  

The motion to drop Flynn’s case must still be reviewed by the judge in the case, but the Justice Department’s handling of the Flynn matter will once again raise questions about the apparent politicization of the Barr’s Justice Department, which seems intent on protecting the president and undermining the outcomes of the Russia investigation. Back in December 2017, just one day after Flynn pleaded guilty, President Trump tweeted that he’d fired Flynn as national security adviser earlier that year because Flynn had lied not only to the FBI but also to Vice President Mike Pence.

The Justice Department has dropped Michael Flynn’s case - Vox

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Former federal prosecutors broadly criticized the decision to drop the case against Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to investigators over his contacts with Russian officials. Elie Honig, a legal analyst and former federal prosecutor in New York who has been critical of Barr, said Justice was wrong to say the FBI’s interview with Flynn was unjustified. He argued the bureau had “ample basis” to talk to Flynn given the intelligence they had on him communicating with the Russia’s ambassador. He also disputed the assertion that the documents released last week showed Flynn was the victim of prosecutorial misconduct, saying the notes showed what would be routine discussion among agents about an interview. “If you’re not strategizing that way, you’re not doing your job,” Honig said. “There’s nothing scandalous about it.” Critics of Barr zeroed in on Trump’s public comments of pardoning Flynn, saying Barr essentially took that step for him.

Storm builds around Barr over dropping of Flynn case | TheHill

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Two entries earlier, we featured David Ignatiof asking why, if Flynn had done nothing wrong with his contacts with the Russians, did he lie about it? Here is a possible answer:

Appearing on MSNBC's "AM Joy" on Sunday morning, former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks called out Attorney General Bill Barr for intervening in the court case of former Donald Trump adviser Michael Flynn, saying it appears to her to be a cover-up because Flynn might have had more to offer on Russian involvement in the administration had he seen what his time in jail might look like. Speaking with host Joy Reid, bluntly called the Justice Department's actions under Barr a "cover-up." Noting that Flynn had already pleaded guilty and the trial was in the sentencing phase, the former prosecutor stated that whole situation reeked of corruption at the highest levels. "This is a clear cover-up," Wine-Banks insisted. "It is because probably Flynn knows something that Trump does not want revealed, and he's trying to protect him. This is a big cover-up. It should be one of the biggest scandals of this administration and because of COVID-19, we're not hearing enough about it."

Bill Barr accused by ex-prosecutor of a "big cover-up" in Flynn case to keep him quiet about Trump | Salon.com

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If the United States had a functioning political system, this Friday night’s twin revelations of malfeasance by the Trump Administration would mark the end of Donald Trump’s presidency and force a snap election. Instead, they are yet another signpost of an executive branch unaccountable to law and insulated from consequences by the cowardice and short-term self-interest of his supporters in Congress.
First, we learned that longtime Trump confidant and Trump campaign associate Roger Stone did in fact have advance knowledge of the release of Clinton’s emails by Wikileaks during the 2016 campaign–and, most importantly told Trump all about it. Trump repeatedly denied having foreknowledge of the matter:

In July 2016, political consultant Roger Stone told Trump as well as several campaign advisors that he had spoken with Julian Assange and that WikiLeaks would be publishing the documents in a matter of days. Stone told the then-candidate via speakerphone that he “did not know what the content of the materials was,” according to the newly unveiled portions of the report, and Trump responded “oh good, alright” upon hearing the news. WikiLeaks published a trove of some 20,000 emails Russians hacked from the Democratic National Committee on July 22 of that year.
Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen told federal investigators that he overheard the phone call between Stone and Trump. Agents were also told by former campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates that Stone had spoken several times in early June of something “big” coming from WikiLeaks. Assange first mentioned having emails related to Clinton on June 12.
The new revelations are the strongest indication to date that Trump and his closest advisors were aware of outside efforts to hurt Clinton’s electoral chances, and that Stone played a direct role in communicating that situation to the Trump campaign. Trump has publicly denied being aware of any information being relayed between WikiLeaks and his advisors.

It turns out Mueller’s team was rightly concerned that Trump was lying to them about the matter. So in short, we now know that Trump’s team knew in advance about the release of Clinton campaign documents electronically burglarized by Russian operatives and passed on through Wikileaks; that Trump’s team did not inform the FBI, but actively welcomed the assistance and secretly kept tabs on the developments; that Trump made public statements welcoming Russia’s further help in stealing private Clinton documents afterwards; and that Trump almost certainly lied to Mueller’s investigators about it in a clear obstruction of justice. 

Even if there’s no smoking gun (yet) implicating Trump and his campaign in directly trading favors with Russia in exchange for leaking the documents, keeping the Russian assistance secret, maintaining secret contacts with its disseminators and lying about it afterwards is, on its own, a clear case of collusion, conspiracy and obstruction.

Worse, we only know about it now because of a Buzzfeed Freedom of Information Act request that forced the removal of the Attorney General Barr’s redactions of large section of the Mueller Report. It is quite clear that there was no actual national security pretext for these redactions, and that by implementing them Barr was engaged in a political coverup for President Trump. This, in addition to Barr’s previous mischaracterizations of the Mueller Report in his personal summaries as totally exonerating the president when it did nothing of the sort, amounts to obstruction of justice on the part of the Attorney General, hiding from Congress crucial information it would need in order to determine if impeachment proceedings were necessary. Now it appears that both Trump and Barr has committed impeachable offenses on this matter.

This revelation alone would have brought any other presidential administration to its knees. But it wasn’t even the biggest story of the night.

For that see:
America just learned about two more impeachable offenses by Trump and Barr – Alternet.org

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Boris Johnson and Theresa May ignored claims the Kremlin had a “likely hold” over Donald Trump and may have covertly funded Brexit, the former spy Christopher Steele alleges in secret evidence given to MPs who drew up the Russia report. In testimony to MPs, the MI6 veteran accused the government led by May and in which Johnson was foreign secretary for two years of turning a blind eye to allegations about Trump because they were afraid of offending the US president. Steele first presented a dossier about Trump to senior UK intelligence figures in late 2016, who he says took it seriously at first. But, he writes, “on reaching top political decision-makers, a blanket appeared to be thrown over it”. “No inquiries were made or actions taken thereafter on the substance of the intelligence in the dossier by HMG [Her Majesty’s government],” Steele says in the critical document... Steele was one of several Russia experts who gave evidence to the ISC. He spent 22 years working for MI6 and led its investigation into the 2006 polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. Later Steele went into private business intelligence..

Johnson and May ignored claims Russia had 'likely hold' over Trump, ex-spy alleges | World news | The Guardian